Paying for Baseball

[Texsox]

The financial side of baseball hinges on two different views of the league. One is of numerous independent entitites (teams) in a competition. This would be analogous to Coke, Pepsi, RC, etc. That is the common thought and IMHO ~ wrong.

 

Baseball stages a series of entertainment events around the country and hires performers to go on this road show. While Coke could survive very well without Pepsi, the Yankees can't survive without competitive teams to play. They would wind up looking like the Harlem Globe Trotters.

 

What is the best way to insure competitiveness? One way is like WW whatever wrestling and script the results. Not very satisfying and baseball would loose fans.

 

They could eliminate city names; no home vs. away, just like the circus comes to town.

Not a good idea either.

 

So they need to distribute the talent evenly around the league. A draft worked well for a long time but Curt Flood and the players changed that. Now we have teams that might draft well, develop talent better than anyone, and in the end they get screwed by the richer teams.

 

One suggestion is an annual player dispersal draft. You can protect X number of players off of your 25 man roster. Maybe 10 or 15. The rest are drafted in a even draft. First pick in round 1 gets last pick in round 2, then first pick in round 3, etc.

 

Some sort of salary cap and salary minimum. Remember the goal is to have competition. It doesn't help if a cheap owner doesn't spend anything.

 

Single payer system. MLB pays all the players and some mechanism is in place to fairly distribute the players. No bidding wars.

 

Now obviously some/most of these schemes would not work, but interesting to think about.